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Saturday, January 24, 2009

Church Record Sunday: The Oneida Community

One of my purposes in starting Church Record Sunday is that I believe that religion impacted our ancestor's lives. I believe that learning about your ancestor's religion and researching religious records can benefit your family history research greatly. I also wanted to include records of religions/denominations that may not be mainstream-in fact they may not even exist today.

Today, I am going to provide some links for records from the Oneida Community. You may be familiar with Oneida as a silverware company. This company was a result of the breakup of the religious group and their forming a joint-stock company. The Oneidians were industrious and one of the outgrowths of this was the present day silverware company.

The Oneida Community was a 19th century Utopian American religion founded by John Humphrey Noyes. Noyes theology was based on Perfectionism, which include self-perfection and communalism. The Oneida Community never had a large number of members, right before the breakup of the group in 1878, there were 306 members.

The Oneida Community was a communal group and had some ‘different’ ideas about marriage and relations between men and women. Suffice it to say, these ideas would have been risque for the time period. The Oneidas challenged a lot of the ideas of their time and were and still would be controversial for some of their beliefs and practices having to do with marriage, relationships and children. One of their more progressive ideas was the equality of women.

A digitized manuscript collection can be found at the Syracuse Library Digitized Projects at http://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/o/OneidaCommunityCollection/. Their website states that they believe they have the largest collection of documents,. etc having to do with the Oneida Community. Digitized items on this website include finding aids, publications, and photographs.

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About Me

Gena Philibert-Ortega holds a Master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies and a Master’s degree in Religion. Presenting on various subjects involving genealogy, women’s studies and social history, Gena has spoken to groups throughout the United States and virtually to audiences worldwide. Gena is the author of hundreds of articles published in genealogy newsletters and magazines including Internet Genealogy, Family Chronicle, GenWeekly and the WorldVitalRecords newsletter. She is the author of the books, From the Family Kitchen (F + W Media, 2012), Cemeteries of the Eastern Sierra (Arcadia Publishing, 2007), and Putting the Pieces Together . Gena is the editor of the Utah Genealogical Association’s journal Crossroads. An instructor for the National Institute for Genealogical Studies, Gena has written courses about social media and Google. She serves as President for the So. California Chapter of the Association of Professional Genealogists and is a board member of the Utah Genealogical Association. Her current research interests include social history, community cookbooks, signature quilts and researching women’s lives.